i have been failing to finish If On A Winter's Night A Traveller due to school work. much better than Invisible Cities and probably The Baron In The Trees as well. i will try and get myself in gear.

thanks to Itchy for the inadvertent recommendation!

Just finished a Sherlock Holmes collection.

Loved it. Read it before going to sleep, read it right after waking up. Read it on the bus, read it on my fag break.

20 stories - none of which contained the phrase "Elementary my dear Watson". Either that was said in a story that doesn't feature in this collection or it was added later by film makers.

I am currently reading The Hundred Tales (Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, a 15th-Century French work based on an older body of stories) translated by Rossell Hope Robbins.

Project Gutenberg has an older copy of the work posted online: http://library.beau.org/gutenberg/1/8/5 ... entire.htm

Rotten Tanx wrote:Just finished a Sherlock Holmes collection.

Loved it. Read it before going to sleep, read it right after waking up. Read it on the bus, read it on my fag break.

So addictive! I inhaled a collection this past winter and gave several as gifts over the holidays. Wonderful way to relax and fire neurons simultaneously.

Last winter I read an H.G. Wells anthology. That was a lot of fun.

Unfortunately I have to read so much technical crap all the time that I seldom have time for fiction.

Colonel Panic wrote:

Skronk wrote:Bourrough's Naked Lunch is a classic.

I dunno... I don't get what all the hoopla's about. I mean, Burroughs was a decent prose stylist and I can appreciate what he did for freedom of speech and introducing experimental techniques in literature, but from an average reader's perspective that book kinda sucked.

It's a hit or miss with Naked Lunch. It really only makes sense if you look at burroughs' work.

Been reading Bill Bryson a lot lately.

The latest one being Notes from a Small Island.

It's pretty good, not as good as some of his other stuff.

Skronk wrote:

Colonel Panic wrote:

Skronk wrote:Bourrough's Naked Lunch is a classic.

I dunno... I don't get what all the hoopla's about. I mean, Burroughs was a decent prose stylist and I can appreciate what he did for freedom of speech and introducing experimental techniques in literature, but from an average reader's perspective that book kinda sucked.

It's a hit or miss with Naked Lunch. It really only makes sense if you look at burroughs' work.

I think that Naked Lunch at this point gets credit for being a "drug" book for a lot of people. There are some great stories, an unexplainable and so far unrivaled prose style...yet, whenever I talk to folks about Burroughs, they mention "oh yeah, he did a lot of smack" or something like that. There's this mystery around this book that intrigues some people, but for the most part, it sucks a lot of people in for shitty reasons.

The Cities of the Red Night, Place of Dead Roads, and the Western Lands are in many ways head and shoulders above Naked Lunch.

Colonel Panic wrote:

Glenn W. Turner wrote:Today I finished reading Free As In Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade For Free Software by Sam Williams. I enjoyed the book despite the mediocre writing and numerous typos.

Rest assured they'll be corrected by the open source community in future editions.

I was actually considering reading that, if I can ever get a break from all these tech manuals and shit.

It's definitely worth reading if you are interested in open source. I missed a chance to see Richard Stallman give a speech, here in St. Louis, last month. I wish that I could have gone. He's one of my favorite speakers.